scholarly journals Writing a Feminine Subject: The Auto/Biographical Narratives of Indonesian Female Celebrities

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110326
Author(s):  
Aquarini Priyatna
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Celebrity Status ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Feminine Subject

Situated in popular culture, celebrity auto/biography becomes both space and instrument for self-representation that illuminates the issues of public/private, global/local, normative/disruptive, and fact/fiction dichotomies. This article works on five auto/biographies of Indonesian female celebrities published in the 2000s, namely, Lenny Marlina, Krisdayanti, Tiara Lestari, Yuni Shara, and Dorce Gamalama. By conducting a close reading of the texts and how the celebrities present their lives, the article seeks to argue that the auto/biographies represent the complexity of Indonesian celebrity femininities that are culturally intertwined. The article also shows that the auto/biographies contribute to establishing their celebrity status and how they present their lives as exemplary. Finally, this study aims at contributing to the understanding of how celebrity auto/biographies complicate the notion of the feminine within Indonesian celebrity culture.

“I can be your Tinder nightmare”: Harassment and misogyny in the online sexual marketplace

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Scripts ◽  
Online Harassment ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Dating Apps ◽  
Sexual Rejection ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Feminine Subject ◽  
Feminist Poststructuralist ◽  
Feminist Work

On Instagram, the accounts Bye Felipe and Tinder Nightmares feature screen-grabbed messages of sexist abuse and harassment women have received from men on dating apps. This paper presents a discursive analysis of 526 posts from these Instagrams. Utilising a psychosocial and feminist poststructuralist perspective, it examines how harassing messages reproduce certain gendered discourses and (hetero)sexual scripts, and analyses how harassers attempt to position themselves and the feminine subject in interaction. The analysis presents two themes, termed the “not hot enough” discourse and the “missing discourse of consent”, which are unpacked to reveal a patriarchal logic in which a woman's constructed “worth” in the online sexual marketplace resides in her beauty and sexual propriety. Occurring in response to women's exercise of choice and to (real or imagined) sexual rejection, it is argued these are disciplinary discourses that attempt to (re)position women and femininity as sexually subordinate to masculinity and men. This paper makes a novel contribution to a growing body of feminist work on online harassment and misogyny. It also considers the implications for feminist theorising on the link between postfeminism and contemporary forms of sexism, and ends with some reflections on strategies of feminist resistance.

Celebrity Worship as Parareligion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pete Ward
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Supernatural Power ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
The Media ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Religious Elements

This chapter presents a study of celebrity worship in an attempt to clarify how popular culture can be like religion, although both remain categorically different. Most approaches to religion involve at least one of the following ideas: a belief in a supernatural power, the significance of religion to generate community life or some kind of church, or a divine power's influence on people's lives. Celebrity culture in almost all of these respects falls significantly short of what is required of a formal religion. Yet rather than dismissing celebrity worship as not religiously significant, it might be possible to cast new light on how, through the action of the media, and through the agency of audiences and fans, something like (and not like) religion is starting to emerge. The term for this is “parareligion.” Parareligion is based on the premise that celebrity worship is not a religion but has religious parallels. Parareligion suggests that religious elements are present but that they are presented ambiguously. These religious elements are often contradictory and open to a variety of different understandings.

Children of the Light: Gnostic Fiction and Gnostic Practice in Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 259-275
Author(s):  
Victoria Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Soviet Regime ◽  
Soviet Science ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
Tunguska Event

This paper offers a close reading of the contemporary Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice trilogy and explores its deep roots in early gnostic spiritual movements of late antiquity, Russian esoteric philosophy and literature, and Western popular culture. Reflecting sources as varied as the Apocryphon of John, the Disney movie Escape to Witch Mountain, Russian New Age paganism, and esoteric Soviet science, these three interconnected novellas are based on the real-life “Tunguska event,” the great fireball that appeared over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908, flattening more than 800 square miles of forest. Famous in ufo circles as the “Russian Roswell” and long a magnet for esoteric speculation, in Sorokin’s hands this probable meteor strike becomes the springboard for a contemporary gnostic fantasy in which a giant chunk of ice carries the spirits of 23,000 gnostic demiurges to earth, where they inhabit human bodies that they despise and seek only to reunite and return to their source. More than a simple postmodern parable of the seventy-year Soviet regime and post-Soviet societal excesses, Sorokin’s damning portrait of his “children of the Light” illuminates the deeper and darker currents of human nature, ethics, and spirituality.

scholarly journals Picturing an Impossible American: Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Photographic Transfers in Portals (2016)

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 212-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Zelt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Identification ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
Contact Zones ◽  
The Us

Abstract This article considers artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s use of photographic transfers and popular culture in her 2016 painting “Portals” to craft an artwork specific to her experience across multiple points of social identification in the United States and Nigeria. Through close reading and the study of Crosby’s formal and conceptual strategies, Zelt investigates how varying degrees of recognition work through photographic references. “Portals” contests assimilationist definitions of American identity in favor of a representation which is multiplicitous, operating across geographies. By juxtaposing images from different times, in different directions, Crosby constructs “contact zones” and provokes a mode of looking that reflects a feeling dislocation from the country in which she stands, the United States, and the country with which she also identifies, Nigeria. After a brief introduction to the artist and her relationship to Nigerian national politics, the article explores how distance and recognition work through image references to express a particular form of transnational identity, followed by an examination of uses of popular culture references to engage with blackness and an interdependent “Nigerian-ness” and “American-ness.” It concludes by contextualizing the painting’s display amid waves of amplified nativist purity in the US.

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